New Player Guide: What to do Before Playing World of Warcraft

Hello everyone and welcome to Flashie and Puddles I’m your host Puddles. Flashie will unfortunately not be present in this series Today is the first video in a two-part series about what you should do when you start to play World of Warcraft. This is also our very first video, and we’re excited to be starting this journey with all of you I Will already assume that you have the battle.net client installed and are working on downloading the game itself. If you haven’t already downloaded the battle.net client, please pause the video and do so now This guide will work both for people who are starting on the full version or the trial version of the game I understand completely if you want to get the trial version before you buy the actual game I’m going to be splitting this guide into two sections.

Section one will be things that you should do before you even open WoW, and section two will be things that you should do before you make your first character I won’t get into choosing your first class, as that will be covered in the next video that will be posted shortly And as long as you’re not going to go into hardcore PvP or rading, for the most part, race choice is purely aesthetic. So let’s get started. The first thing that I want to show you are a few websites to get you started on your journey These websites will be a tool to help you for your entire WoW lifetime And you will probably visit at least one of them every day all of these websites will have their links posted in the description The first website is wow head Wow head is a great resource for questing and achievement hunting if you’re stuck on a quest or achievement and search it By name odds are that you’ll find a decent guide or hint in the comments section of that quest or achievement also Wow head is likely going to be the first thing to pop up if you google the quest or achievement title Next is wow wiki this is a great resource for Warcraft lore and class and race Discussion outside of that I believe that wow head is a better resource But if you’re considering role-playing or getting into the lore of Warcraft, wow wiki is definitely the resource you need to get started Also, we have icy veins Icy veins is a great website for how to play your specific class and spec, it features several pages of guides for each spec In the game and is updated with every major patch.

It features recommended talent trees, stat priorities Enchantments, and gems. This website is a must if you want to even get into basic end game content Lastly we have the WoW subreddit. Have a question that hasn’t been answered anywhere else? Just ask the WoW subreddit! Generally you will have a good answer in a matter of minutes from a real person who actually plays the game You might even find me on there from time to time Now that I’ve told you about a few websites, and you’ve gotten Wow almost ready to go There are a few more things that need to be installed: add-ons Add-ons add-on to the game experience by giving you tools to help you get around Change the appearance of the screen help you with bosses or just improve your overall quality of life Add-ons will not however play the game for you Not only is this against the Terms of Service But Blizzard has locked out all functionality that might even remotely allow add-ons to take control away from the player So to install add-ons we’re going to use the twitch client I’ll put the link in the description for you and trust that you can download and install it on your own I’ll take a break for a few Seconds here for you to pause the video and install the app as it is required for the next step Now that you have the twitch app installed open it up and go to the mods tab and click on world of warcraft From here click on the get more add-ons tab now you can search for some add-ons We’re not going to install too many add-ons right now as we don’t want you to worry about managing too many There are only three add-ons that I recommend that absolutely everyone should install The first add-on is called SellJunk This is a tiny quality-of-life addon that does exactly what the name implies It sells junk there are some items in Wow that serve no purpose other than to be sold to vendors for money This is known as vendor trash Normally, you will have to sell each individual item But with sell junk you can simply press a single button to sell all of it Actually you may have to press the button multiple times, but it’s better than selling everything piece by piece The next one is called DBM which is short for deadly boss mods this mod helps You fight bosses by giving you warnings timers and tells you what to do There are some players who will kick you out of a raid if you do not have a boss mod installed And I’ve found that DBM works just as well if not better than the other boss mods out there and has a larger community So there’s a lot of support available of course if you find another boss mod that you like better have at it The last one that I’m going to recommend is TomTom a sort of Wow GPS system that you can plug Coordinates into and it directs you This is incredibly useful when you’re achievement hunting or stuck on a quest and find an answer on wow head with coordinates Although there is a coordinate system currently in WoW TomTom adds waypoints and will show you how far you have to go and even gives you an ETA There are tons of add-ons available and these are just three I encourage you to go exploring around the twitch app and find some more add-ons after playing for a while So you know what you’re looking at and looking for Now we can finally start the game itself.

I’ll pause here so that you can start the game and watch the first time cinematic Okay now I actually don’t remember what screen you’re going to load in on if you have no characters But you want to be on the server selection screen and there are only two possible screens that you could be on right now The server selection screen, and the character creation screen. If you’re on a screen that looks like this, then follow the next few instructions Otherwise hold tight for a minute. If you’re on a page that looks like this, hit escape You should now be on a screen that looks like this Now hit the change realm button on the top right to get to the server selection screen Alright everyone on the server selection screen? Great! Now we have to find a server to play on. Characters are locked to servers And you cannot change Which server the character is on without spending actual money to do so, so server selection is a bit of an important process The easiest way to select a server is see which server your friends are playing on and play on that one.

If your friends don’t play wow however you’re gonna have to pick a server on your own The first thing to consider when choosing a server is the type of server there are currently four types of servers normal, pvp, RP, and RPpvp normal is the standard MMO experience players can’t attack players of the opposing faction if they aren’t both flagged for PvP and Players are not expected to roleplay On PvP realms players are always flagged for PvP meaning that players of opposing factions can always attack one another RP Servers are the same as normal with regards to PvP, but players are expected to roleplay lastly RPPvP servers are the exact opposite of a normal server where players are constantly flagged for PvP and are expected to roleplay You choose the experience that you want to play with in terms of server choices Next there’s server time.

This is unfortunately not listed on the server selection screen So I’ll leave a link in the description of all of the servers and their time zones. Why is this important? Generally guilds will line their raid times to be reasonable times for the server for instance a guild on Skywall, which is a server that is based on Pacific time may start their raids at p.m.. Server time This is a very reasonable time to start a raid However, if you’re on the East Coast this means that the rate starts at 10 p.m. Local time and if the guild is trying for progression, then you may be there until 2 a.m. Local time while the server is only at 11 p.m.. Which is a very reasonable time to go to.

Unfortunately there are 246 us realms and listing them all out here with all of their time zones would not be feasible So at the end of the server discussion, I’ll be choosing a few servers per time zone, and type that I recommend Lastly, there’s server population. Again, this is not a very advertised statistic outside of new low Medium high and full servers.

There are a lot of low servers and even I mainly play on a low server But it doesn’t feel low, while there are some other low servers that exists that really feel empty. The best way to check how Populated a server is is to check two websites both of which will be in the description the first website to check is realmpop.com This is the best place to go to check the ratio of Horde Alliance players in the number of people on a realm This is handy to make sure that you’re not going to be playing on a dead realm The next website is wowprogress.com this checks How well is servers progressing with current content Simply search for the server that you’re looking for and it will pull up all of the characters Or guilds that are making progress in relevant content on that server This is a good supplement to realm pop as even though a server may have hundreds of thousands of characters They may not be doing relevant content Rather than have you sift through the almost 300 servers, I’ve Taken the liberty of choosing a few US servers that I believe are a good place to start and are all in the chart shown on screen right now.

A few notes about this chart; the first is that all RPPVP servers in the US are on Central Time The second is that you’ll probably notice that a lot of these boxes have the names of multiple servers That’s because these servers are connected what that means is that multiple servers act as one combining the populations of the servers and allowing trading and guild joining between them I tried to pick servers with a good balance of alliance and horde players and also with a decent population in at least 50 guilds on the server making some progress in current content raiding.

While these aren’t the most populated servers I really tried to go for balance, and a full server Isn’t really the way to go when you’re first starting out as it’s easy to get lost in the crowd However, these servers are of a decent size as I made sure to choose servers that weren’t dead the smallest server on this list earthen Ring has almost 200,000 characters on it and 22,000 level 110 characters with 57 guilds progressing in current content So I made sure not to pick servers that were too dead also balance between horde and Alliance is important on PvP servers with the overwhelming majority of PvP servers being Horde heavy I made sure to pick some servers that were relatively balanced with the most imbalanced PvP servers on this list being Deathwing / Executus / Kalecgos / Shattered Halls at 6 Horde players for every 4 Alliance players Compare that to the most imbalanced PvP servers, Stormrage and Mal’Ganis, with Mal’Ganis being 98% Horde, and Stormrage being 97% Alliance, and you can see that I made sure to get it as even as possible So in a later series I will be making a character myself And he will be on the Skywall server.

Why Skywall? Well I like the name, and the aesthetic of the Skywall dungeon, so while there’s absolutely no difference between the servers, other than balance Population, RPing, and PvP, it just sounds cool It is a normal Pacific time server, so feel free to join me although I do not mainly play on that server and will not be very active on there unless I’m working on one of my videos Otherwise I do highly recommend the servers listed above Now there’s just one more major choice to be made horde or alliance Again, if you have friends who play WoW, then your choice is easy, just go with your friends, otherwise It’s mostly aesthetics and storyline You’re going to find good players and bad players on both sides Although a lot of people claim that you will find more mature players on horde side You will also find several mature players on the Alliance side however you do have more horde guilds on the bleeding edge of content but with that comes elitism I’ve always been happy with Alliance and I do have a max level horde character But I do mainly play Alliance if you want to play horde or Alliance and go right ahead I won’t hold it against you So that’s all you have to know and do before you make your first character except for picking your class Which there will be an entire video going into that because there’s so much stuff to cover there that it will require its own video Which will be uploaded very shortly So I will put the link to that video in this video after I upload it Other than that if you have any other questions Or you feel like I didn’t cover something correctly drop a comment down below If you like what I’m doing and would like to see more of it, please like and subscribe Other than that have a wonderful day everyone